Both parties say they're ready to work together in Illinois House

With the election over, legislative Republicans and Democrats say they are ready to work together, and getting Illinois out from under a $13 billion deficit depends upon it.

CHRIS WETTERICH

With the election over, legislative Republicans and Democrats say they are ready to work together, and getting Illinois out from under a $13 billion deficit depends upon it.

“Look, we were in an election cycle, and now, the policy hats are on, and we all work together,” House Minority Leader Tom Cross, R-Oswego, said in an interview Monday. “The state’s in real trouble financially and jobwise and budgetwise and otherwise.

“We’re painfully aware of that. The election’s over. It’s behind us.”

Both the House and Senate will be in Springfield today for the start of a six-day veto session.

Asked whether there is animosity between his boss and Cross, Steve Brown, spokesman for House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, replied, “No.”

House Democrats will work with the Republicans, Brown said.

“I don’t have a problem with him (Madigan),” Cross said. “I want to work with everybody, and if people are mad at me, I’m sorry. But I’m putting aside whatever differences — and I think they’ve been blown out of proportion — but if they exist, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve got too many problems to worry about.”

In this month’s elections, Cross tried to ride the national Republican wave and knock Madigan out of his speaker’s post. Republicans put billboards up in the Chicago area blaming Madigan for the state’s debt. Once the votes were counted, Republicans netted six additional House seats, but remain short of the 60 votes needed for a majority.

‘Grown-up things’?

Last spring, Republicans refused to help Democrats pass an income tax increase. Democrats refused to hold votes on a slew of Republican-sponsored bills GOP legislators said would save money. Arguments broke out as Republicans tried to dislodge their bills from the Rules Committee, a panel where Madigan sends legislation that the majority wants buried.

Republicans said they were excluded from budget talks. Madigan repeatedly called them “nonparticipating dropouts.”

While pledging to find solutions, Brown blamed the GOP exclusively for the last two years’ stalemate.

“We’ll continue to work cooperatively,” Brown said. “That’s what we’ve been trying to do over the past two years. The actions they took over the past two years were designed to gridlock the government and get them the majority. … It was not successful. They’re the ones who initiated it.

“We’re focused on grown-up things. It appears all of those high school pranks didn’t have much of an impact.”

Kent Redfield, political science professor at the University of Illinois Springfield, said when the state has faced budget problems in the past, both parties have worked together to craft solutions.

“If you’re going to make a bunch of tough votes, there needs to be some kind of agreement that will allow you to minimize the exposure of individual Democrats and Republicans,” Redfield said. “In order to provide cover — cover for cuts, cover for tax increases — it’s better to have some kind of a structured roll call.”

Tax hike unpopular

Both sides said they took a similar message from the election — voters don’t want a tax increase. While Quinn campaigned on raising the income tax from 3 percent to 4 percent, legislative candidates from both parties mostly campaign against new taxes.

“No one had an exclusive on constituents who felt they couldn’t afford a tax increase,” Brown said.

Cross said the Democrats’ strategy for staying in power was at least partly based on co-opting the Republican’s anti-tax message.

“We’re not looking to fight. We’re not looking to be obstructionist, but we fundamentally need to do things differently,” Cross said. “I’ll take the Democrats at their word during the campaign that they believe that as well. That’s what they ran on.”

The two sides have worked together before. In 2004, Madigan, Cross and Senate Republican Leader Frank Watson fought and outflanked then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich and then-Senate President Emil Jones for a more austere state budget during an overtime session. Blagojevich and Jones blasted Madigan and questioned his credentials as a Democrat.

All the happy talk aside, neither side could answer whether it is possible for Republicans and Democrats to return to that atmosphere of relative cooperation.

“I don’t know,” Cross said. “I don’t know.”

“You’ll have to ask them,” Brown said.

Chris Wetterich can be reached at 788-1523.

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